Building Movement Capacity w/ Dr. Roop Sihota — 300

Dr. Roop Sihota is a PT, a coach, and a movement enthusiast. He has been a long time team member and coach at MobilityWOD and San Francisco Crossfit, and recently launched a new movement project called ORIGINS.

Dr. Sihota is inspired by movement and is focused on the exploration of movement. He also loves working with movers from around the world. He started ORIGINS because of his passion to give back and provide educational content to help people make more complete decisions.

In this episode, we dive into why there is no such thing as bad movement, how to make more well rounded decision, why you should incorporate more play in your life, top inflammatory foods, and more. Enjoy!

Special bonus: Tune in to the very beginning of the video podcast on YouTube to watch Dr. Roop Sihota demonstrating 4 minutes of movements from ORIGINS.

ORIGINS — A Human Movement Project

Dr. Roop Sihota has travelled the world teaching people how to move and how to fix their movement issues. He used to think he had answers for everybody’s movement issues, but proved himself wrong. After noticing his solutions only worked for some clients, Dr. Sihota went through a transformation.

For the past few years, Dr. Sihota played the student role. He researched and explored many movement practices, and attended various movement seminars worldwide to figure out his gaps.

Dr. Sihota also got inspired by the book Essentialism: The Art of Less, which is focused on finding what is it that you do really well, what is it that you enjoy doing, and what is it that you can make the biggest impact. Every time he read those phrases he came back to the same conclusion (that he needs to work on): Artistic creative movement as a means to building a healthy body. And it needs to be given to people in a free source manner.

Dr. Sihota wanted to give back to the community and help people figure out how to live a healthier life with less pain, which is why he created ORIGINS — A Human Movement Project.

ORIGINS is about introducing people to simple small movements that they can incorporate into their workouts. It’s an educational platform that provides weekly 10–15 min movement pieces that can be incorporated at the beginning of workouts, at the end of workouts, or as your warmup. ORIGINS is meant to help people get a much better understanding of movement across the board and make more well-rounded decisions.

Key Takeaways

There is no such things as bad movement — Your body should be able to move well in many directions. When you are only moving it a certain way, again and again, and not opening your horizons to other movements, you will wear down your tissues. But if you are addressing your movement limitations, you will see improvements.

It’s all about your goals — Dr. Sihota is focused on his clients goals, that’s what it’s about. It’s about making people happy and excited to train.

Neurologically challenging movements — Dr. Sihota suggests mixing unique movements to your warmups. Ones that challenge you neurologically and are applicable to real life situations. He specifically likes movement flows, so you can get the body challenged before your system can get adapted.

Incorporate more play in your life — Adults play is almost non-existent today. Both Dr. Sihota and Mike recommend incorporating more play in your life, whether it’s during workouts, in your backyard, or on the dance floor. Play improves coordination, reaction time, and overall happiness. ORIGINS has many playful elements in it’s programming, look out in the next few weeks for tabata style tag games, walking on PVC pipes, and more.

We want the body to always be thinking rather than sleeping, except for when we want it to sleep.” — Dr. Roop Sihota

Functional Medicine — Once Dr. Sihota became a father a couple of years ago, he put more emphasis on leading a healthy lifestyle, both nutrition and movement wise. Dr. Sihota played with the idea of becoming certified in Functional Medicine, but first he became the patient himself. After getting comprehensive testing, including various blood tests, urine and stool tests, genetics test, etc. Even though Dr. Sihota was very conscious about his health, eating 90% healthy foods, moving often, etc. He discovered he had low testosterone, low vitamin D, high cellular oxidation levels, and more issue.

Top 7 inflammatory foods — As part of trying to figure out what causes his health markers to look bad, Dr. Sihota took out the top 7 inflammatory foods out of his diet: sugar, corn, soy, peanuts, dairy, eggs, and gluten.

Supplementation — Dr. Sihota is taking a dozen supplements a day to get his health marker stabilized. He’s trying to figure out which would be short-term vs long-term. His supplements include collagen protein, fish oil, vitamin D/K2, ashwagandha (an adaptogen that helps with organ function and is in Organifi Green Juice), zinc, and probiotics.

Low testosterone — Can be caused from a variety of issues: Low vitamin D, a leaky gut, and more. It’s important to have a holistic view and figure out your underlying issues before treating something.